Burlesque! Caffeine & Suicide! Mustache!

Last Friday was spent at a party. A burlesque party. To better fit in with the crowd of Manson fans and strip-tease performers, I presented myself in tights and with a mustache + soul patch. I’m going to try this feature on for a couple of days. So far most people are bemused. I don’t know, is it too Wyatt Earpy? (Also, please notice the author pose I have going on. I’d be an awesome writer if I would only not have to actually write something)

Newspaper publishers should consider consolidating and outsourcing news operations — even overseas — to save money as revenues continue to shrink, the head of a major U.S. newspaper company said Monday.

→ USA Today: Outsourcing could be in journalism’s future.

In July of this year, the now-defunct Eureka Reporter reported that McClatchey has outsourced the copy editing of the Orange County register to India, outsourced the advertising design department of the Fresno Bee to India, and had intended to outsource the copy editing of the Miami Herald to India but ultimately changed its mind on that one.

→ Watching the watchers: Offshoring/Outsourcing Journalism: The Unstoppable Bad Idea?

Although caffeine does not produce with life-threatening health risks commonly associated with the use of classic drugs of addiction such as cocaine, heroin and nicotine, some caffeine users report becoming “addicted” to caffeine in the sense that they report an inability to quit or to cut down their caffeine use, they continue to use caffeine despite having medical or psychological problems made worse by caffeine. and they continue to use caffeine to avoid experiencing caffeine withdrawal symptoms.

→ John Hopkings Medical Center: Information about Caffeine Dependence

The motif of harmful sensation is a recurring idea in literature: physical or mental damage that a person suffers merely by experiencing what should normally be a benign sensation. The phenomenon appears in both traditional and modern stories.

→ Wikipedia: The motif of harmful sensation

Both McKinney and Bedard told me about people who took Tylenol or phosphorous, which also destroys the liver (and incidentally produces phosphorescent vomit). In both cases, they slept off the initial sickness and recovered for five days — during which time they decided suicide was a mistake after all and they wanted to live. But the liver had been destroyed and after five days each of them started to feel very sick, passed into deep coma, and died. “He knew it would happen and that there was nothing we could do about it,” Bedard said, “and his friends and family knew it, and for five days they sat in the hospital together waiting for it.”

How not to commit suicide, by Art Kleiner, 1981

I want you to know that I have a deep affection for you. I am deeply grateful for all your kindness. I wish I could have made a happier life for you. It was mostly my fault, please forgive me.

Suicide notes. ibid.

Jill Tracy – Evil night together:

[audio: https://monocultured.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/01-evil-night-together.mp3]

I’m looking specifically about a rejection of postmodern theory (I apologize for the broad terminology), that looks at thinkers like Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, Deleuze, Jameson, etc etc, that accurately comprehend their arguments, and then rejects them. That is, if postmodernist thought is broadly characterized by a general rejection of singular, grand narratives and a method of critical thought that involves a disbelief in foundations — then I’m specifically interested in arguments that go against these characterizations and arguments.

→ Ask.metafilter: Anti-postmodernism for postmodernists?

Suicide. Synonyms.

On the bridge, Baldwin counted to ten and stayed frozen. He counted to ten again, then vaulted over. “I still see my hands coming off the railing,” he said. As he crossed the chord in flight, Baldwin recalls, “I instantly realized that everything in my life that I’d thought was unfixable was totally fixable—except for having just jumped.”

→ Golden Gate bridge and suicide, written in 2003 by Tad Friend: www.newyorker.com

The man was grabbed on the eastern promenade of the bridge after passers-by noticed him pacing and growing increasingly despondent. The reason? He had picked out a spot on the western promenade that he wanted to jump from, but separated by six lanes of traffic, he was afraid of getting hit by a car on his way there.

→ The mechanisms and prevention of suicide, by Scott Anderson, 2008: www.nytimes.com

Checking for squirrels. Wagging the unemployed. Shifting to fifth gear with the purple-veined kidney stabber. Spanking the shit out of your incapacitated midget. Attacking Mr. Happy. Soaking the whisker biscuit.

→ 1700 masturbation synonyms: www.worldwidewank.com

Yesterday, a guy in Chicago burned himself to death in protest against US foreign and domestic policy. He wrote his own obituary and posted it online ahead of time. That next to last paragraph reads “He had many acquaintances, but few friends; And wrote his own obituary, because no one else really knew him”.

Regardless his suicide, his letters are worth reading. If nothing else I see myself in much that he wrote, and he didn’t take himself too seriously even when writing his last letters.

Read the obitiuary here: http://www.savagesound.com/gallery100.htm
Read him expaling why:http://www.savagesound.com/gallery99.htm
Infoshop has a short article here: http://www.infoshop.org/inews

I got the story from boingboing.net and it feels odd. Shouldn’t this be on the front page of papers and such? This is quite an extreme thing to do, and considering all the text he posted about both his planned suicide and his political stance it wouldn’t be too hard to do a background check.

And if you want to distance yourself from his very personal letters and despair, you can always check out the list of others who have set themselves on fire in protest.

Unless he was mentally ill and planning on killing himself regardless, do you realise what level of despair is required to do something like this? How furious you have to be at the willfull ignorance of people in general? My head is spinning slightly, because I get a sensation of vertigo reading through his texts.